Greater New Orleans

Cuonzo Martin, right, smiles next to athletic director Sandy Barbour as he is introduced as the new men’s basketball coach at California at a news conference in Berkeley, Calif., California hired Tennessee's Cuonzo Martin as its coach, charging him with taking over another program after a successful run by his predecessor. Martin replaces Mike Montgomery, who retired last month after six seasons in Berkeley. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu)

Few things in sports are more fascinating than posturing between management or an administration and a coach. It's a silent negotiating tango, seeing which one has the best move and then countermove.

Then both make the move that is in each other's best interests, one side appears to be a winner and the other is publicly vilified.

And the villain probably doesn't mind it. Because who is really using who?

For instance, there's the University of Tennessee waltz between athletic director Dave Hart and Cuonzo Martin, who quit Tuesday as Vols' basketball coach to become coach at the University of California.

Martin, who was hired by previous Vols' AD Mike Hamilton, just finished his third season with the Vols. He replaced the popular Bruce Pearl, who was fired because he lied to an NCAA investigator.

The mistake Martin made at Tennessee was being true to his philosophy. Compared to Pearl's teams of fast-breaking athletes, Martin's teams played a grinding Big Ten style, no surprise since he played in college as well as coached under former Purdue coach Gene Keady.

Martin certainly didn't have Pearl's bold and brassy personality that played well with Tennessee basketball fans, who, like most SEC fan bases, need a good reason to support anything besides their beloved football.

SEC football fans usually don't care for style points, as long as their teams win.

But SEC basketball fans are different. They want to win and be entertained, and Martin's Tennessee teams were far from entertaining, despite falling one win short of having three straight 20-win seasons and playing in the NIT twice and NCAA tourney once.

His teams seemed to play better in the last 10 games in the regular season - the Vols were 22-8 in those contests. And in his first two seasons, he was a combined 4-2 against Florida (3-0) and Kentucky (1-2), clearly the two best teams in the SEC.

But this year, when Tennessee was 15-10 and 6-6 in league play and with Pearl's face on ESPN every night as an in-studio analyst, the Big Orange mob got restless.

Someone started a petition to bring back Pearl. As the petition climbed to supposedly 36,000 signatures, Martin's team got on a 9-3 run that ended with an NCAA Tournament Sweet 16 loss to Michigan.

So here's where it gets interesting.

Martin said Thursday in a radio interview with a Knoxville radio station that Cal officials contacted his agent shortly after the Vols lost in the SEC tourney semifinals to Florida on March 15.

Only when the season finally ended after the Michigan loss did Hart offer Martin a contract raise and an extension.

The raise was just $500,000, raising Martin to $1.8 million per year, which is near the bottom of SEC hoops coaching salaries. With two years left on his contract, the extension was for just two years.

If Hart really had wanted to keep Martin, he would have given him a substantially heftier raise and a longer extension. Most athletic directors also have ears everywhere to the ground, getting information if their coach is getting feelers from other schools.

So here's what I theorize: Hart, as manipulative as the Kevin Spacey character in "House of Cards," practically baited Martin into taking another job.

Both Hart and Martin realized that as soon as the Vols started losing next year - and they probably will because of graduation losses and an early NBA departure by Jarnell Stokes - the call for Martin's head would have started all over.

So by not firing Martin, Hart didn't have to buy out the last two years of Martin's contract. By Martin leaving with two years left on his contract, he or Cal have to pay Hart and Tennessee a buyout of $1.3 million.

Martin, who said he has no hard feelings toward Hart or Tennessee (why should he?), gets to escape three times zones away. He's immediately accepted by an appreciative fan group that only knows he took a team to the Sweet 16 this year.

Hart, who thanked Martin for his services, gets to hire his own coach while financially coming out ahead.

Isn't the business of college athletics just grand? Who wants to next dance with the devil in the pale moonlight?